Monday, August 22, 2011

The last-place Dodgers limp into St. Louis having lost five of their last seven. The Cards, a distant second place in the NL Central and third in the wild card, need to make up ground, and fast. They're sending a resurgent Carpenter against the Dodgers' callow Eovaldi. Oh, and the Dodgers have a franchise winning percentage of .444 in St. Louis. But hey, at least today's game is on TV!

Sax's note: SoSG Alex Cora and I made it to St. Louis and are at the game today. We'll be reporting live from St. Louis!

Interesting ad on the St Louis scoreboard right there for Peabody Energy. They basically made it look like the scoreboard and ribbon scoreboards shorted out, only to come back on and tell us that coal powers Busch Stadium and that Peabody Energy brings us that power.

Nice play by Miles on that comebacker that was just outside Eovaldi's glove. He had to wait until after it passed Eovaldi to make the play, so he stutter-stepped to see if it was going to be deflected or not.

@DK323: yes, that is a more accurate description of what they did to build the new Busch. They had about half of it built and had to finish it once the season ended in 2005, so they could build the rest of the new one in 2006.

Trivia time! According to the press notes, eovaldi is one of the handful of pitchers under 22 to open careers with 3+ starts of 5+ IP, less than 2 runs and 5 hits of less since 1946. Can you name the others?

I was at the new Busch III during the NLCS in 2006 when I was traveling to St. Louis for work on a semi-regular basis. The park wasn't complete, mostly on the club level. I remember my access card from my office in Pittsburgh opened all of the RFID-style locks on the club level so I took in a good chunk of the game from the shell of what would become a suite. The plumbing was done in my "suite" so I had a personal bathroom. Alas, no catering, though.

Way back in the day, I ran the IT systems including the badge/keycard system for a few location of a large ad agency. I recalled that during office remodels or new space build-outs, the installed system was "all-open" meaning any badge would activate any lock. It was up to an admin to lock things down which is why, generally, the card readers on outside doors are never hooked up until well after construction is complete. The system at Busch was all wired up so I gave it a shot. Sure enough: green light, audible beep and the sweet click of freedom.

I also ran the PBX system for that company. I can still route free calls through their system since they never changed the access codes or the toll-free dial-in support line. I haven't worked there in 11 years. Not that I'd ever do anything like that.